Caro diario ti scrivo

(Dear journal, I'm writing to you)Book not yet available in English

Summary:

Six 12-year-old girls are completely different among each others in character and physical appearance; they live in different periods and countries, but they share a common future: they will all become important writers when they grow up. All six of them started writing by filling in the pages of a diary. They are Matilde Serao, Beatrix Potter, Anna Maria Ortese, Emily Dickinson, Silvina Ocampo, Jane Austen.

Comment:

The idea of this book, written together by Patrizia Rinaldi and Nadia Terranova – even though the two authors are actually responsible for different chapters – is interesting and original. Rinaldi and Terranova have recreated the pages of a fictional diary written at the age of twelve by six important writers. Although these diaries are very different from one another – they are commendable and quite successful in the attempt to diversify them stylistically – nevertheless they describe that moment in the lives of the six girls, in which they discover the extraordinary and imaginative power of writing. Since these are motivated and conscious girls, their pages are also an invitation to work with determination for what is considered important, providing a model and a set of values that serve as an alternative to those conservative traditional female roles that still prevail in our culture today. The paratext is interesting and carefully edited, presenting brief but pleasant biographies of the six writers, some peculiarities, and a short note from the author of each diary (Rinaldi or Terranova) on the reasons, sources, and material from which they imagined the diary itself. Moreover, at the end of the volume, the two authors include a few pages of their 12-year-old fictional diary describing how and why they decided to become writers. The book is clearly aimed at girls, both in the foreword and in the choice of the cover colour, and this is perhaps its greatest limit. Pink is by now a much too conventional colour to be used in an interesting and ambitious publication such as this one, which aims to show portraits of bold and unconventional women (not to mention the page numbers that are inserted in a heart). After all, this book could and should be an interesting read also for boys…